Long Range Patrol: A Novel of Vietnam (The Jim Hollister Trilogy Book 1)

by Dennis Foley

  “Ba mui ba … thirty-three?”

  “Okay. Can do. Ba mui ba. We hab,” she said as she wheeled to place the order.

  “Goddamn, sir. We thought they fuckin’ court-martialed your ass,” Davis said.

  “No … but I thought I’d never get out of there.”

  “The waiting hasn’t been that bad, sir,” Theodore said.

  Theodore was smugly stroking the bare leg of the little bar girl on his lap. She was not yet in her twenties, wore a miniskirt and a tube top that she kept fighting to keep up while Theodore was trying to slip it down.

  “Oh, this is Tuyet, sir. She loves me too much.”

  Hollister saw that Theodore was on the verge of getting shit-faced.

  “Trung-Uy, you wan’ girl? I can do. Get you pretty V’namee girl. Cherry girl. You wan’?” Tuyet asked.

  Hollister spotted the half-empty champagne glass of Saigon Tea on the table. It was the toll exacted by the management for Tuyet’s presence on Theodore’s lap. The glass had been refilled several times. Though varying widely in content throughout bars in Vietnam, Saigon Tea was universally overpriced and under-strength.

  To prevent a barrage of arguments and charges against Hollister’s manhood and spending practices, he said, “Let me have a beer first. Okay?”

  Before Tuyet could begin her second round of sales pitching, she was interrupted by Davis, who leaned as far across the table as he could to be heard. “So what’s the deal with the spooks? They fuckin’ with you, Lieutenant?”

  “Something’s going on that I don’t understand at all. The other night, when we hit that VC patrol, someone wiped out a whole hamlet down on the valley—just below our ambush site.”

  “Same patrol we ambushed?” Davis yelled.

  “Don’t know, but whoever fired up those civilians was using American weapons. And we did police up some U.S. gear.”

  “Goddamn slope motherfuckers! I told you, sir. This shit is ’cause of the lazy-ass South Viets. If they’d get their lazy asses outa their fuckin’ hammocks at night and patrol the valley, there’d be more rice to eat and more civilians alive there in the goddamn mornings.”

  “You talk too much, Davis. Be nice. Don’ be ugly,” Tuyet said, reacting to his anger.

  Davis gave Tuyet a glare. “Why don’t you just let babysan over there buy you more Saigon Tea? Okay?”

  “Hey, Sarge. Some slack here. This is my one love in the world. Do what she says, be nice,” Theodore said, using the excuse to embrace and fondle Tuyet some more.

  Davis leaned back in his chair, threw his hands in the air, and howled like a wolf. “Yeah, she’s yours, man—and every other stiff dick with two hundred piasters.”

  The others laughed at Theodore. “Lemme tell you something, young soldier. You don’t leave those zips alone, you gonna end up broke and dead from dick rot,” Davis said.

  More laughter.

  “Hey! It’s my money—”

  “And your dick,” Davis added.

  “Right. So let me do what I want with it, Sarge.”

  Davis leaned forward, took a sip of beer, and spoke just above the noise level. “Lis’en here. You end up on one of my patrols with a sneezin’ peter and it’s gonna fall off out there. I ain’t compromisin’ no patrol to call a Dust-Off in for your dick.”

  Vinson had been quiet up to that point. “Here, Theodore, this ought to sterilize it for you.” He picked up a beer, pulled open the front of Theodore’s shirt and poured a full beer down the front of his chest.

  The others laughed hysterically as Tuyet jumped to her feet swearing in Vietnamese. Theodore just sat there shocked.

  Suddenly the room started to pick up the words the band was singing. It was to become one of many Vietnam anthems. One, then another, soldier stood and sang along with Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City.” Most of them didn’t know all the words, but they all sang loudest at the lyrics “I wanna go home. I wanna go home. Oh Lord I wanna go home.”

  The Annam Hotel, a single-story building, had a large central room that served as a makeshift lobby, with several guest rooms off of it. In recent years more tiny rooms had been added onto the back of the hotel, over what had once been a laundry area and livestock yard.

  As they entered, Hollister spotted a group of Vietnamese prostitutes waiting to be picked over by the arriving guests.

  They ranged in age from eleven to fifty. All smoked harsh Vietnamese cigarettes or Salems, and their dress was less than provocative. Those few who had made some attempt at makeup were miserable failures. The older ones had terrible teeth and put their hands to their mouths each time they laughed.

  The team stopped in the center of the checkerboard-blocked linoleum floor, discovering the cluster of available women before any other feature in the hotel lobby.

  Davis pointed to a numbered door. “That’s mine, Camacho’s is next to it, and Doc, Vinson, and Theodore are in the back. You can bunk in with me if you want, Lieutenant. There are two half-assed racks in my room.”

  Hollister looked at the hookers. “I’m sure you’d like a little more privacy. You know, in case you want to entertain?”

  Davis nodded. “Oh, yessir—entertain. I may just have to do that. I think that I need to work on improving relations with our little zipperheaded allies.”

  “I’ll see if the papasan here has anything left.” Hollister walked over to the old man sitting behind what served as the hotel desk, smoking a homemade cigarette stuffed into an L-shaped wooden cigarette holder.

  Navigating with great difficulty, but with some care for his own dignity, Camacho quietly moved to his room and entered, unnoticed by the others.

  Hollister thanked the old man, who got up to lead him to his room. He turned to let the others know that he had been successful. But by then they’d all disappeared. So had the prostitutes. Hollister knew that they wouldn’t miss him.

  While he waited for the old man, he had to shake his head in amazement at the range of emotions they had all been through in the previous forty-eight hours. He was suddenly very tired and ready for bed.

  Hollister turned and followed the old man toward the back of the hotel. As he walked out the back door, Hollister heard Theodore trying to convince two of the hookers to try out a threesome. He smiled at Theodore’s approach. Smooth it wasn’t.

  The deuce-and-a-half truck stopped outside the LRP compound. Hollister and Team 2-3 leaped from its bed. A couple of the team members hollered thank-yous to the driver for giving them a lift. But their voices were lost in the trumpeting of the exhaust stack, which left a plume of black diesel smoke.

  As the truck pulled away Sergeant Davis said, “Whoa! What the hell …? Bar-bee-cue!” breaking into a wide grin.

  The others ran around the truck and looked into the LRP compound. There, outside the mess hall, stood most of the detachment, spread out around three half-barrel barbecue grills made of old oil drums.

  Easy, Doc Tillotson, and Sergeant Kendrick were manning the three fires, cooking steaks and chicken over soft Vietnamese charcoal. There was lots of loud talk, and not one hand was without a beer or drink in it.

  Many were working on soft drinks because one patrol per platoon had to remain on alert at all times—sober, gear packed, each man in the compound and ready to go on fifteen minutes’ notice. It was one policy that no one complained about.

  Stuffed, Hollister dropped the last of his chicken bones on a paper plate. With no napkins, he licked his fingertips and rubbed the remainder of the grease on his trousers. The stains would blend in with the old traces of rifle-cleaning solvents and oils he had used to clean and lube his weapons.

  “Pretty good shit, huh?” Easy asked, standing in front of Hollister with a T-bone steak held out for him.

  “Right. But I can’t eat another thing, Top. Where the hell did you get this, anyway?”

  “Lieutenant … you know better than to ask a first sergeant where he got something. ’Cause if you ask, I have to tell you. And if I tell you, you’ll h
ave to do something about the logistical channels that I used. You were an NCO long enough.”

  “Well, Top, sometimes I forget my place. I just hope it won’t go hard on me when I get invited to that big NCO Club in the sky,” Hollister said.

  “Lieutenant, there’ll be a standing invite for you there—it’s policy. You’ll be forgiven for accepting a commission.”

  Hollister raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. Wherever it came from, I loved it. Please give my regards to the nameless and faceless who were responsible for the first Class A rations I have had since yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?” Easy said with surprise.

  “Yeah … I slipped into The Nautique yesterday and had a steak. Water buffalo steak, but it was still steak.”

  “Valle tell you his war stories?”

  “Yeah … and warned me, too,” Hollister said.

  Easy put the steak back down on the mess hall tray. “I been knowin’ Valle nearly fifteen years. We went to the Jungle Warfare School together in Singapore. He was one helluva Airborne trooper. You shoulda seen him the night we were in a whorehouse in Penang and this dumb fuck from—”

  Bernard ran out of the Operations tent yelling, “Top, where’s Cap’n Michaelson?”

  Easy pointed toward a cluster of troops. Bernard made a quick turn and ran to the captain.

  “Contact?” Hollister asked.

  Easy looked around at the others in the compound. There was no sign of activity at the Operations tent or near the chopper. “I’d guess not.”

  Bernard excitedly explained something to Captain Michaelson. They could tell that something hot was happening; judging by Bernard’s gestures, it was somewhere north and west of the LRP compound.

  Captain Michaelson looked around, caught Hollister’s eye and signaled for him and Easy to meet him in Operations ASAP.

  Inside Operations, Hollister, Davis, Sergeant Allard—team leader of 2-1—and Easy quickly took notes while listening to Captain Shaw. Captain Michaelson, Lieutenant Perry, Gladiator, and Iron Mike stood nearby.

  Shaw pointed out a spot on the easel-mounted map. “This is where the chopper crew spotted the downed aircraft. And, because of the dense foliage, they were only able to ID the bird-dog crash site. They saw no signs of life, but that doesn’t mean anything at this point.”

  Shaw looked up at Captain Michaelson, who gave him a hurry-up gesture as he tapped the face of his watch. “So, even though this is a little loose and doesn’t give you a lot of time to prepare, we have to go with what we have, and fast.

  “Lieutenant Hollister will take two teams from his platoon in to find and evacuate any Americans from the crash site. If there are any critical items or any onboard ordnance, it will be evac’d or destroyed at his discretion.”

  Shaw pulled a chrome collapsing pointer from his shirt pocket, extended it and pointed to a clearing on the map a few inches from the grease-penciled crash site on the map overlay. “Movement will be by chopper to an area up the ridge line from the downed aircraft.

  “The heavy team will take only one day’s rations and the basic load of ammunition. Extra demo will be necessary to blow trees if you find any survivors who need immediate evac.”

  Hollister listened to the operations order. His mind clicked on to a thousand little things that he had to remember and make sure got taken care of before the team lifted off. He knew that the first thing he had to do was to assume that the single-engine two-seater had been shot down—even if it had only gone down from engine failure. And based on that assumption, he could organize the rescue force and prepare for the worst.

  He hated short-fused missions. LRP teams didn’t have the mass or firepower to overcome a lack of planning and rehearsal. And on a recovery mission they would go in like noisy elephants and be anchored to a spot on the ground until the evacuation was completed.

  VC in the area could move at their own speed to screw with the Americans. A downed aircraft was great bait for an ambush. And Hollister couldn’t prep the area with gunship runs and artillery because there might be a couple of pilots wandering around. He told himself to forget how he hated rescue missions and just get on with getting the job done. He looked at his watch. It was getting late and it was getting dark.

  At dusk the four slicks stood at flight idle on the LRP pad. Near them the eleven-man team was outlined by the strange strobing of the flashing red running lights of the helicopters. Each man was hunched over by a heavy rucksack.

  Hollister hurriedly inspected each man’s gear by looking at and touching everything—a variation of an Airborne jumpmaster’s inspection. Touching what he looked at kept the inspector’s eyes on the equipment. There was time to be saved by looking at some things while touching others. But that made the inspection incomplete and could cost lives. So, Hollister’s eyes followed his fingers.

  After he slapped the last man on the back, Hollister was satisfied that there had been no equipment compromise in the short warning time. But he was out of time. Only a faint red line on the horizon separated the night from the setting sun.

  After some last minute coordination between the pilots, Michaelson gave them all the go. He got into the right seat of the command-and-control chopper, Hollister and Team 2-3 moved to the first insert chopper, Allard and Team 2-1 moved to the second insert chopper, and Easy moved to the cargo compartment of the fourth ship.

  Easy would be belly man in the chase ship. The belly man was a senior sergeant or one of the more experienced officers not otherwise busy during inserts and extractions. The job required being an extra set of hands and eyes to help make sure that if the chase ship was pressed into service, things happened fast. The belly man helped each man into the chopper and was responsible for accounting for all of the bodies—dead and alive.

  Once the chase ship had picked up a team or chopper crew, it was the belly man’s job to sort out who needed medical attention, apply first aid, and advise the pilot on the needs of the wounded while the crew focused on getting the chopper out.

  Easy had used his rank to pull more than his share of belly rides. He was lots of bullshit and bluster, but there wasn’t a man in the heavy team that evening who wasn’t happy to know that First Sergeant Evan-Clark was belly man in their chase ship.

  For a change, the members of the teams were relatively silent. Conversation was confined to business. The mission was foremost in everyone’s mind, and no one was in a playful mood.

  One of the first things Hollister had noticed after joining the detachment was that there was something about the anxiety of night helicopter insertions that always took the normal level of bravado down several notches. They didn’t do night airmobile assaults in infantry battalions.

  The chase ship followed a few rotor disks behind the two insert ships. Slightly behind the chase and a few feet above was the command-and-control ship. Flying in staggered trail, the four slicks were flanked on the left and right by two Charlie-model gunships.

  Charlie-model gunships were a recent addition to the Airborne Brigade’s support. They looked like the B models, but had a greater lift capacity and had earned a reputation for accuracy and overwhelming firepower. They could also loiter in the area longer and carry more ordnance than the older choppers. Very few of the lethal choppers were in country yet.

  The flight of six leveled off at 2,500 feet and settled into a coordinated race to the landing zone.

  In Hollister’s chopper he, Vinson, and Camacho sat in the right door. Davis, Doc Norris, and Theodore did the same in the left. At eighty knots their fatigue trousers flapped violently and their legs trailed to the rear from the wind.

  Hollister jockeyed for a comfortable spot just inside the door, where there was a small pocket of not-so-turbulent air. In that narrow corridor he could have all of the visibility he wanted while avoiding the strongest eye-watering wind.

  Hollister remembered the first time he rode in the door of a chopper over enemy-held terrain. Logic told him that he was easier to see and mo
re likely to get hit by ground fire sitting there. He soon found that even if an enemy gunner got lucky enough to hit the chopper, there was no safe place. An AK-47 round was just as likely to pass through the thin skin and fuel cell of the chopper before striking him as hit him in the door. The only advantage of being hit in the door was that the round would not be distorted by striking the chopper first.

  Where to be when a chopper was going down was another matter. Pilots and crews felt that they were more likely to survive a crash belted into their seats, wearing their chicken plates—slabs of fabric-covered metal made to fit over crew members’ chests. Most wore them strapped across their chests. But many opted to sit on them. Hollister guessed it was all a matter of personal priorities.

  But for grunts, going down in a chopper brought on only one thought—be as close to the doors as possible. The last thing they wanted was to be inside when a chopper crashed. It was fraught with peril. If the blades struck anything, the mounts could give way, causing the engine and transmission to come through the cargo compartment and destroy anything in their path. At least that was the myth.

  The second big fear was fire. Fire was the aviator’s nightmare. Hollister suspected that there was not a pilot flying in Vietnam who had not seen a friend burned into what they laughingly called crispy critters. There were no small fires in chopper crashes. So, all this considered, Hollister sat in the door.

  He got comfortable and looked around the chopper. The others were in a kind of twilight sleep. Few would drop off on such a short flight, but they were all deep in thought. Hollister guessed that none were thinking about anything closer than ten thousand miles.

  CHAPTER 9

  HOLLISTER LOOKED STRAIGHT OUT at the gunship flying alongside. The position lights on its side glowed brightly and the beacon on top rotated. The two pilots were silhouetted in the red light given off by the instrument panel.

  Iron Mike Taylor was flying left seat. He must have looked over and spotted Hollister looking at him because he raised his fireproof glove in a thumbs-up. Hollister returned the signal and smiled. He had a healthy respect for Iron Mike, who had saved his ass more man once.